Wormwood III - The Horror

Wormwood ]|[ - The Horror is a three-map Halloween-themed PWAD for Doom II, requiring Boom-compatible source ports, made by Zachary Stephens (Ribbiks) and Grain of Salt, and released on November 1, 2021. The third title in the Wormwood series and a direct sequel to Wormwood: Expanded Universe, the WAD picks up after the death of the player at the end of the previous entry, representing a sort of purgatory the player has to fight through. The maps escalate in length and difficulty, interspersing challenging combat puzzles with medium difficulty platforming sections.

In December 2021, Wormwood III received an honorable mention at the Cacowards.

Levels

 * by Ribbiks
 * by Grain of Salt
 * by Ribbiks

Soundtrack

 * MAP01: "AIT.MID" by Ribbiks
 * MAP02: MIDI rendition of "The Tower of Dolls" (from )
 * MAP03: "CMARP.MID" by Ribbiks
 * Title screen: "Scary" (from )
 * Intermission: "I Want To Show You The Poplars" by AANA X4

Custom content
Wormwood III makes use of a DeHackEd patch for most of its custom changes. It also carries over the modified color palette and colormap from Wormwood: Expanded Universe, making green colors in sprites and certain textures glow in the dark, while most blues are being turned into shades of purple and the color range of orange is given brighter hues overall, making flames and lava look more vivid. The blue, red and yellow keycards & skull keys are replaced with purple, orange and green variants, respectively.


 * Death floor: This square-shaped, red floor is able to damage and kill both the player and monsters, even though demons are normally unaffected by damaging sectors like nukage or lava. The effect is created by placing a type of explosion generator in the center of the floor in the form of a invisible barrel which is modified to continuously explode on every tic, with the floor being exactly 128 map units in diameter ensuring that the area of effect of the blast damage from the barrel covers the entire surface of the floor, damaging anything that steps on it.


 * Death pits:Most of the platforming challenges in WAD have to be performed over pits that will instantly kill the player should they fall into one of them. This is made possible through the use of non-solid, continuously exploding custom mobjs that cover the entire floor of these pits with their blast damage area of effect. However, Boom's 242 - Create Fake Ceiling And Floor linedef action is applied to these floor sectors, creating a fake floor above the real ground floor, which blocks the line-of-sight check performed by, thus shielding the player from any damage until they drop below it. The fake floor has the same texture as the real floor below it, giving the illusion of a solid surface the player drops onto, when in reality they fall right through it, being killed almost instantaneously, and then coming to a rest on the real floor below, with the reddening of the screen due to the damage inflicted masking the transition.


 * Meteors:These black stones engulfed in neon green flames function as environmental hazards, flying in a straight line just above the ground along narrow walkways and have to be maneuvered around to avoid coming into contact with them. When they impact with the player, the meteors will explode, dealing massive damage that will kill the player or push them off the walkway. The meteors are repurposed cacodemon projectiles that themselves deal no damage. However, when they hit an obstacle, they trigger an arachnotron attack on their death frame, which instead of shooting a stream of plasma, spawns a secondary, exploding meteor that calls twice in a row on its first frame of animation, dealing the blast damage experienced by the player. The meteors themselves are launched by out-of-sight modified SS Nazi guards that fire a cacodemon projectile/meteor whenever their pain state is triggered. Since their pain chance is set to 100%, this is guaranteed to happen whenever they take any damage. Placed behind the meteor launcher is an explosion generator in the form of a modified burning barrel that calls  at every tic, constantly dealing blast damage. In order to control the spawn rate of meteors, a wall between the launcher and the modified burning barrel is by default closed, shielding the launcher from the blast damage, and then rapidly opened and closed again at specific intervals through the use of instantly lowering and raising sectors controlled by voodoo dolls inside out-of-bounds conveyor belt closets. The fact that the meteors themselves do no damage, but instead only spawn the actual damage-dealing secondary meteor, ensures other monsters do not infight the launcher when hit by a meteor, since the projectile that dealt the damage wasn't spawned by it. Once a meteor is spawned, it is propelled forward through the use of Boom's linedef action 253 - Scroll Floor, Move Things. This would normally only affect objects on the ground; however, this is overcome by making use of Boom's linedef action 242 - Create Fake Ceiling And Floor; applying it to the sector with the meteor launcher in it creates a fake floor above the normal one, which results in all objects below this fake floor being now affected by the floor-scrolling line action, including projectiles and flying objects, thus propelling the meteors forward in the direction of the scrolling floor.


 * Cacodemon:The cacodemon has been modified to shoot baron of Hell fireballs, greatly increasing the damage of its attack. Its sprite has also been altered to have the blue color of its mouth, eye and blood remapped to green, which due to the changes in the color palette and colormap glows brightly in the dark, while the rest of its body is remapped to shades of brown, giving it a desaturated look.


 * Arachnotron:The arachnotron has its attack replaced with a modified version of that of the mancubus; but with just two repeating volleys of shots rather than three, which it will cycle through non-stop, resulting in a firing pattern that sees it spraying plasma shots from left to right in an almost drunken manner. The plasma projectiles also have their color changed to orange and their damage is increased, matching that of a baron of Hell fireball (8-64 damage rather 5-40).